Somnambulism in Verdi's Macbeth and Bellini's La Sonnambula: opera, sleepwalking, and medicine.

摘要: The arts can provide unique ways for determining how people not directly involved in medicine were viewing and informing others about physical mental disorders. With operas, one need only think various perturbations of madness have been portrayed. Somnambulism has long a particularly perplexing disorder, both to physicians the laity, it features number operas. Two mid-nineteenth-century masterpieces are examined detail this contribution: Verdi's Macbeth Bellini's La Sonnambula. In former, sleepwalking scene is faithful what Shakespeare's had written early seventeenth century, time witchcraft, superstition, belief that nocturnal wanderings might be caused by guilt. opera, contrast, victim an innocent girl who suffers from quirk nature, hence eliciting sympathy compassion. By examining literature on somnambulism comparing disorder these we see thinking condition changed and, more generally, music was helping generate new specific diseases medicine.